How influential has Kai's art style been?

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King13s
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How influential has Kai's art style been?

Post by King13s » Fri Feb 02, 2018 11:37 pm

How influential has Kai's art style and animation been on the fandom?

I caught some of Kai and, as old man grump as this might sound, it looked too clean. The characters didn't bleed or get dirty the same way. Their muscles looked like balloon animals, all shiny and puffed.

Needless to say, when Battle of Gods and Resurrection F came along, I was not prepared. The characters looked so different. New school art is here to stay, and I get that. The old page by page animation days are long gone, but I feel this has changed so much. Fight choreography especially has changed a lot.

In the end though has this effected the fandom in regards to bridging the Gap between Z's release a decade ago and Supper's current run? Obviously people have been upset when the animation has fallen flat, but I blame the studio for overworked and underpaid staff just not being up to it.

Some episodes have been phenomenal, but they don't look like DBZ. For a better understanding, cause I'm rambling. Think of how different Z art is to opening cut scenes of PS2 videogames. The art was so jarringly different.

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ErikB
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Re: How influential has Kai's art style been?

Post by ErikB » Sat Feb 03, 2018 2:38 am

Kai uses the original footage for the most part, just colour corrected and recut. I'm going to assume you're talking about the openings and endings which are new animation. In which case, a name you want to be familiar with is Tadayoshi Yamamuro.

Yamamuro was the character designer for the later parts of the Z anime, and has been on the franchise pretty much ever since. Lots of people, myself included, tend to agree that the quality of his art has diminished significantly, and the art style he uses for the modern era animation is definitely a bit flatter and...Iunno, I always thought "over-streamlined" was a good descriptor.

As for "page by page animation" being gone, I just need to stress that hand-drawn animation is not mutually exclusive with digital animation. I'm a professional animator, and while the animation I do at my work isn't what you would consider hand-drawn animation (though a lot of hand-drawn rough animation goes into producing it), I do fully hand-drawn animation off and on during my free time and I never touch paper at any point in the process. I use a Cintiq tablet which allows me to draw directly onto a screen.

That having been said, Dragon Ball Super's animation does actually start on paper, only that it's scanned and coloured digitally afterwards. Every frame of the animation you see is still an individual drawing that an animator drew by hand.

So the point I'm trying to get at is that the state of technology is in no way responsible for why the characters are drawn the way they are. They look the way they do because that's how Yamamuro insists people draw them.

In fact, if you haven't seen them already, you might be pleased to see the 2 episodes of Super that Yuya Takahashi worked on (114 and 122 I believe), in which his art was extremely reminiscent of late Dragon Ball Z.

Anyway, back to your original question, I've definitely seen a decent amount of fanart that's clearly emulating Yamamuro's modern style. And there is a selfish part of me that's disappointed when I see it. But then I remember being 9, not realizing how bad Z could look from time to time and often being inspired by the worst of the worst-looking of Last House's episodes. Really I/we should be happy to see young fans inspired by the series to create art. Those who choose to take that passion somewhere will likely pick up better habits along the way. Life Drawing is a mandatory part of any formal education in visual art, and a good understanding of the fundamentals learned through life drawing makes the flaws in Yamamuro's style extremely glaring.

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KBABZ
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Re: How influential has Kai's art style been?

Post by KBABZ » Sat Feb 03, 2018 4:02 am

When it comes to the redrawn shots, I often found that the lineart wasn't as confident and bold as it needed to be. I also felt that there wasn't enough effort made to make them look like the old footage: the lines are all set to a single thickness, there's no noise or grain, and the colours aren't faded to make it all look old.

The intro suffers from similar problems, but at least the drawings themselves are good enough to hold up. There are a few shots though where the pose-to-pose doesn't quite work, like Gohan jumping down to Goku on the Nimbus.

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Re: How influential has Kai's art style been?

Post by Robo4900 » Sat Feb 03, 2018 6:20 pm

KBABZ wrote:When it comes to the redrawn shots, I often found that the lineart wasn't as confident and bold as it needed to be. I also felt that there wasn't enough effort made to make them look like the old footage: the lines are all set to a single thickness, there's no noise or grain, and the colours aren't faded to make it all look old.
The differing colours isn't due to the original footage having faded colours, part of the point of Kai was that they did an excellent job at restoring the colours to excellent condition. The problem with the redraws is that they didn't match the colours to the rest of the episode's palette correctly, much like how the line thicknesses didn't match the original line thicknesses well enough.

In regards to the more broad subject of this thread, I'm also very much not a fan of Super's overly-clean look, and IMO that stupid filter they started putting on at the beginning of the Tournament Of Power arc makes it even worse.
The point of Dragon Ball is to enjoy it. Never lose sight of that.

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KBABZ
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Re: How influential has Kai's art style been?

Post by KBABZ » Sat Feb 03, 2018 8:07 pm

Robo4900 wrote:
KBABZ wrote:When it comes to the redrawn shots, I often found that the lineart wasn't as confident and bold as it needed to be. I also felt that there wasn't enough effort made to make them look like the old footage: the lines are all set to a single thickness, there's no noise or grain, and the colours aren't faded to make it all look old.
The differing colours isn't due to the original footage having faded colours, part of the point of Kai was that they did an excellent job at restoring the colours to excellent condition. The problem with the redraws is that they didn't match the colours to the rest of the episode's palette correctly, much like how the line thicknesses didn't match the original line thicknesses well enough.
Er, that's what I meant? I think I worded it incorrectly...

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Robo4900
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Re: How influential has Kai's art style been?

Post by Robo4900 » Sat Feb 03, 2018 8:54 pm

KBABZ wrote:Er, that's what I meant? I think I worded it incorrectly...
Well, the way you said it, you're saying the reason the colours don't match up is because the film colours "Look all old", which isn't very close to the truth, all things considered.
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KBABZ
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Re: How influential has Kai's art style been?

Post by KBABZ » Sat Feb 03, 2018 9:25 pm

Robo4900 wrote:
KBABZ wrote:Er, that's what I meant? I think I worded it incorrectly...
Well, the way you said it, you're saying the reason the colours don't match up is because the film colours "Look all old", which isn't very close to the truth, all things considered.
Well by look old I meant that the colours in the touched up original footage still show their age for the most part. In the redrawn shots, the colours are taken straight from the palette without several decade's worth of aging behind them, so it doesn't look exactly the same, and is one of the ways you can immediately tell one apart from the other (aside from the thin line stuff).

Image

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Robo4900
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Re: How influential has Kai's art style been?

Post by Robo4900 » Sat Feb 03, 2018 10:37 pm

KBABZ wrote:Well by look old I meant that the colours in the touched up original footage still show their age for the most part. In the redrawn shots, the colours are taken straight from the palette without several decade's worth of aging behind them, so it doesn't look exactly the same, and is one of the ways you can immediately tell one apart from the other (aside from the thin line stuff).
That's not to do with the age, it's just to do with them being different colours. Kai was a very well-done CC, and in a lot of ways modernised the look of the show. The redraws using the wrong colours isn't down to the footage's age, it's just down to the animators choosing the wrong colours, and never fixing it.
The point of Dragon Ball is to enjoy it. Never lose sight of that.

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